How Caleb Hammer Built a Massive Membership (feat. Hammer Media President Robert Kaliati)

0:01Welcome to Creator Upload, your Creator Economy podcast. I am Lauren Schnipper. And I'm Joshua Cohen. Lauren. Back from the halls of Congress. Joshua Cohen. I was in the halls of Congress. Tell, first of all, we have an amazing interview today. Robert, I'm going to mess up his last name, Kailati. You're going to have to make sure that that's correct. He's the president and CEO of Hammer Media. You're going to get into what they're doing there. There's going, there's some, there's some very interesting sort of paywall things happening. Great, exciting, but really need to understand how you are shaping the future lives of the citizens of this country.

0:36Go. Lauren, I'm just basically practicing my First Amendment, which, you know, gives people the freedom of religion, speech, the press, peaceful assembly, but also, importantly, the right to petition the government. He definitely Googled that. He definitely didn't know that. Go on. Sorry. No, that was a preamble we had before we entered the room where all these representatives of Congress were to talk about the Creator Caucus and what creators are, what they do, how they're important fabric of the modern economy and more. So you were there with what organization? Creator Caucus. Give us more details about this.

1:11Great question. I'm glad you asked. Thank you. What is the Creator Caucus? So it is an organization. It's a bipartisan group called the Congressional Creators Caucus. And it started in June 2025 by reps Beth Van Doon and Yvette Clark. Beth Van Doon is a representative in Congress from Texas. Yvette Clark is from New York, specifically Brooklyn. And basically the genesis for this. Republican and Democrat cross party lines. Go on. As many of these bipartisan events are. that's right the genesis for this happened when uh representative beth van doon went to the kind of like grand opening of dude perfect's new facility in texas it's not quite in her district but it's close to her district and she was invited there by dude perfect as really a way to show local representatives how big the creator economy is and what it's doing and she went there and she saw it with her own eyes and that was her kind of like aha moment where it clicked for her she got it.

2:13All these videos that these young people in her life watch, you know, they're just seen on a screen, but then putting some kind of IRL fabric on top of that and going and seeing these facilities, going and seeing how Dude Perfect at their new offices are employing like 60 plus individuals in the state of Texas really created this moment for her where she's like, okay, I get it now. This is an important part of our ecosystem. Yeah. People don't understand that it takes work to make videos. They just think like there's still many, many people that just think the internet just gets turned on and all the things are there.

2:45And I like I don't mean that in a disparaging way. I just think that like people are busy and live lives that are not in media. This is years ago, but I'll never forget. I was on the phone with like I want to say like an insurance company or something really random when I first worked at Facebook. And I think they were like asking me who my employee was. And I was like Facebook. And they were like, oh, I didn't know anybody worked there. Like this is like I swear to God, I will never forget this. And I mean, this is a while this was like 2014 but like still like you know that it's a company you know you know what i mean and it was big enough at that point you know but people just they're and that why would they so like this is so new that like until you you know i used to i used to take people that didn't understand anything about this sort of industry to sort of vidcon to see like the expo floor and all that sort of stuff to see the fans which is still i think effective but a lot of times where i like to like try to get people to see things are like darman studios go to a dude perfect go to mythical and you see you just walk in the door and you're like oh this is a company i might not know understand what they do but it's a company and then to your point you're like okay like okay the companies have hr and then they have employees and they have to do it and they pay taxes and then you're like oh i've got to service this you know what i mean and then the things like this happen like you know and so the experience that you just talked about lauren is a i think uh would be a great example would be a kind of easy outcome for lots of what these creators go through on a daily basis when they're trying to get mortgages, when they're filing their taxes, when they are looking for accountants and legal representation to understand their ecosystem and this industry.

4:18There are lots of stumbling blocks because creators aren't this seen entity in terms of the eyes of the government. So when they are going to file their taxes, there's no creator drop down, which means that there is no sense of like how big this ecosystem is, how many people are employed as actual creator in the eyes of the government. And that has a ton of these downstream effects where then it's very difficult to get funding, financing, other types of goods and services apply for SBA loans. Because what can a small business argue? I was going to say like small businesses. Yeah, exactly. Like how do you even think about this?

4:55You know, thinking about filming and permitting and like all that sort of stuff. Should you have regulations? Should you not have that? Like, what does that even look like? You know? No, I think it's, I mean, it is a new industry. And there's historically in this country been many new industries that then the government has to build laws and regulations and, you know, or not, or just like understand. And I think, so you again, serving the people. So you're there, you're at the creator caucus, like, what are you doing? Like, what are like, how are they mining you for just like answers and information?

5:23Like what's happening? Just to get a little bit more context about how it started, Matthew and Stephanie Patrick of the Game Theorists, they really spearheaded this initiative and brought this group together and really gave it a shape and a form. And now there's several members of Congress who are part of it. And what's really interesting here is this can be a true bipartisan issue and not a coastal issue either, because there are creators in every single congressional district. Matt and Stephanie live in North Carolina now. They don't even live in, you know. Exactly. And so what the Creator Caucus is, is this organization where these members of Congress can be part of it and they bring in different creators and experts within the industry to come get some face time with these members of Congress so they can answer questions on one end of the spectrum being like, what is a creator?

6:14How do they get paid? How do they operate? And the other end of the spectrum would be to, okay, what do you really need for us to make an impact here? I understand how this ecosystem works. What's going to be really beneficial for you? And that can be talking about AI likenesses and being protected against deepfakes. It can be about getting this NICS code, which is that drop down when you file your taxes about that you are a creator that has those downstream effects that we talked about. to talking about how getting paid on a net 120 isn't sustainable for these small businesses when they're making these brand deals and a whole lot more.

6:52So it can run the kind of gamut of questions. And we were there to provide a face that's not a member of one of the major platforms. It's not employed by one of these big companies that's lobbying Congress to get more recognition for this. In the room, there was YouTube there, there was TikTok there, Patreon, Instagram, Meta, and more. all with kind of like representatives that they chose to bring out in order to interface with these different individuals, these members of Congress and their staffers. And this is really interesting for members of Congress, I think, for a few different reasons.

7:25One is just that there's a huge economic impact that YouTube and the creator economy at large have on the U.S. economy. So YouTube just released a report that said overall, not just YouTube, But overall, the creator economy in the U.S. contributes$110 billion to the GDP. That's bigger than several states. YouTube alone, this was the report they did with the Oxford School of Economics last year. They said YouTube contributed$55 billion to the U.S. GDP, which, again, is bigger than at least a couple states. Right. There's 490 or 500 ,000 jobs that are attributed to just being part of this YouTube creator ecosystem.

8:09And you put that all on top of like YouTube is now 12 to 13 percent of all U.S. television consumption. Streamers are consumed on TVs more than broadcast networks now. And you have all these other contributing factors to just the overall meta narrative that like the Internet's big. YouTube's big. Creators are a thing. they should be recognized and just on par with other types of small businesses and workers in our economy. Well, I think it's also just like you mentioned the downstream effects, but the other downstream is like you're talking about like in Los Angeles, like here, like it's like, you know, when like the industry, they stop making films here.

8:47Well, the downstream effects of that are like the caterers, the hair people, the makeup people, like the sort of like below the line people that are like makeup, the working class of L.A., which has really been decimated because of this. And so you've got this new sort of industry that's going to have all of those kinds of people that are going to be supporting it that are very much not the person on the camera right there's going to be all i mean we've got jimmy who's creating a whole you know through that i think it's eastern carolina university or something like that like a whole program for people to like learn how to not necessarily be youtubers but learn how to support the youtube like the youtube video ecosystem the creator video i should say you know ecosystem so there's like people that are training to do this that are going to go out to the workforce to try to get jobs that might not necessarily again be to be like on camera but they're like going to be in the industry and And so, you know, it's like it seems really flip frivolous, but it's actually not when you've got, you know, what is it?

9:35One out of every like four kids that they want to be a YouTuber and they grow up like, you know, we'll talk about it. That's a good idea. But like it's you got to start paying attention to that because those people eventually are going to be voting. So it's like 100 percent, you know, and so I mean, it's definitely like better late than never. But they're getting, you know, at least these conversations are starting. In 2026, over 50 % of the U.S. voting population is going to be composed of Gen Z and millennials. And they grew up with all this content. I'm telling you, they really did. Real quick, you also went to Publish Press the other day, Colin and Samir's event.

10:07And tell us what happened there. Tell us all about it. So it was their second press publish event, the first one they had in New York last year, which was fantastic. This year, it was on the Fox lot in Los Angeles. It focused on the intersection of Hollywood and creators. and I thought it was a fantastic event. They had a marching band, Lauren, on the Fox lot that escorted people from one location to another, which I thought was just ingenious. It was like the UCLA marching band, right? It was the UCLA marching band, which is just great use of a marching band. I also think humans are innately programmed to follow people playing instruments.

10:39Yeah. And so if you want to move people from one location to another, get a marching band. Yeah, what are you going to be like, no, I'm not going to follow the marching band? Like, of course you're going to follow the marching band. Yeah, exactly. I love that. Like that would have been enough for me. I'd have been like, great. This vent's already it's already I'm already good. And then there were a bunch of panels and sessions too. One of my favorites was Markiplier came out as a surprise guest. Markiplier, Mark Fischbach, who just recently is one of the darlings of indie Hollywood because his movie Iron Long was independently produced.

11:12He wrote, starred, directed, produced it, and more for the tune of like four or five million bucks. And then went on to make 50 something million in the box offices. he was on stage just talking about his process how he did it i think he's a unique individual who is fiercely independent and for better or worse wants to be involved in every single component of how his film is being made so he talked about kind of the trials and tribulations of going through that process and he talked about how his film is now available to be rented or bought on YouTube. And that process was not an easy one. He was joined on stage with Tim Waltz, who is taking over for Tara Walpert-Levy as the VP of the Americas at YouTube.

12:01I think this is one of his first big public speaking moments in that new role. He mentioned how YouTube now has 15 different ways that creators can make money on the platform. He said, please don't ask me what all of them are sure yet but there's 15 different ways one of them are these purchases of movies but it's not an easy process you usually have to be part of a studio or part of an established distribution network markiplier was neither of those there's no just like upload portal that you can go put your stuff up on youtube to be rented or bought right and he had to create his own kind of mini distribution network in order to get his own film up on the platform and he'll be then utilizing the distribution platform to get other films from creators he likes up on YouTube too.

12:49So basically he created a little mini studio. So is he sort of like saying he's open for business if you have a film, like this is the best way to do it is just go through me. Like, is he going to take a cut? Yeah, he's mentioned on the press. He didn't talk a ton about that on stage. More so about like what this kind of meant for him, what his goals were. He said, if I can make this and it's going to be one person's favorite movie in the world, I've succeeded. He's at a point in his career where the money doesn't really matter to him. He just wants to do and iterate and learn from the process and make stuff that he feels really passionate about and enjoys.

13:21And that really shined through when he was out on stage. All right. Well, I think that's a fantastic transition to what's happening in theaters right now. So in addition to MarketFlyer, this past weekend, this is bananas, you guys. The top three movies coming out in theaters were Backrooms by YouTuber Kane Parsons. Obsession by YouTuber Curry Barker. And the number three movie was The Mandalorian and Gragu by Jon Favreau, a freaking Star Wars movie, was the third top grossing movie of the weekend, which is bananas. And I think it's worth noting that Backrooms was made supposedly for around$10 million.

13:58Obsession was made for about less than a million dollars. I mean, these are like 10 millions are relatively like moderate, like sort of like budget for movies. And I, you know, Star Wars was made for infinitely more than that. And this is just a moment that is happening in where there's like this transition where these kids that grew up are now ready to sort of make features. So I think what's exciting about this is that like the feature film is not dead. People, by the way, and kids want to go to theaters. That's also really exciting. I think that is an experience that is, I think, an important experience and not everything should be shot and seen on your phone.

14:29But I also think what's interesting about this, that it's worth noting that all these films, Markiplier's included, are horror films. And what makes that genre, I think, unique is like there definitely is a level of scrappiness that you can do with horror that I think you can't really kind of get away with for a theatrical release with other genres. And there's just like a cult following. So it's like the perfect genre, I think, to sort of be the, I don't want to say first foray, but like this makes sense that this is where the initial kind of levels of success are happening because you can really do this for like a budget.

15:00And And it's really, it's crazy. It's exciting. Yeah, I think in moments like this, it's easy to get blown out of proportion and be like, okay, YouTubers are the next filmmakers. Right. And they're going to be amazing. And you got to go find a bunch of YouTubers who can go make films and then go make them with them. Yes. I think it's good to like isolate on what actually happened here. One of them is they're all in the horror genre. Which by the way, we've tried to do this before in other genres. And it hasn't really worked. It is worth noting that these are all horror movies. I think if we were going to make this, the kind of blanket statement that YouTube is now where original IP can manifest and be created and cultivated and then be distributed to a much wider platform on with a bigger budget and a much bigger potential audience.

15:43There would need to be some like rom-com or some kind of drama or some type of suspense thriller that originated on YouTube and came from YouTube creator that then went out to the masses. I think it's too early to talk about that yet, but you can say for sure that YouTube creators are coming up with original IP that is doing incredibly well on the platform and then translating very successfully to a much wider theatrical audience. I think also the opportunity here, and I work with a lot of companies like this, is figuring out like how kind of the traditional media can help exploit potentially in these other categories, you know, this IP into bigger like, you know, bigger experiences like features, for example.

16:25Like, I think that, you know, listen, I'm going to be real. YouTubers historically are not like the best collaborators in a lot of way because because they like to do things on their own because that's the way they've always done it. I mean, you know, that's just the way it is. Those that I have seen that have been the most successful are those that collaborate, those that have the most longevity because they don't think you will burn out 100 percent guaranteed you will burn out if you do everything on your own. So there's a real opportunity for those that are like open to collaborating, because I can tell you there's a lot of traditional media companies that want to figure this out.

16:53And they're very good at building IP and exploiting it and distributing it and merchandising it and all this sort of stuff. So the ones that are savvy on both sides, traditional and sort of creator, and I also like to say, caveat, asterisk, it's all media. It's not one. It's not separate, but sure. Those are the ones that like that's what I'm really excited to see is I think there's even going to be there's going to be even more and more of an appetite for all this because of the success. And so this is but I mean, beating Star Wars, it's not not not. Yeah, it's a big deal. I also think it's really that Kane Parsons, aka Kane Pixels on YouTube, one, won a Streamy Award a few years ago.

17:28Obviously. Was a creator on her from MatPat who shut them out early on in his trajectory. Obviously. And two, he created this whole new genre called backrooms. And you could see it employed by severance, relied heavily on the genre and was directly influenced by it. there's also all these other types of creators whether they're roblox or minecraft creators or just other horror creators that are utilizing the back rooms kind of like aesthetic and just core lore in a lot of their storytelling formats and so that i think is a lot of its success too it's not just take any kind of horror person online that they're not going to translate to this kind of degree it's really he created this this genre and he should be awarded for that and it's obviously doing very well.

18:19So much so that now there's all these brands on board that are making their own backrooms parodies. McDonald's came out with a few. Oh, really? But that doesn't happen if it's just some like random kind of horror adaptation. It happens when you get real innovative IP that hasn't been seen before that is easily replicable that other people can riff on. All right, Josh, very excited to hear your interview with Robert. Let's get to it. Robert Cagliotti, thank you so much for coming on Creator Upload. We're incredibly excited to have you here. Hey, Josh, nice to see you again after you underestimated your pickleball skills a couple of months ago when we first met.

18:58So if anybody tries to or if Josh has to tell you that he's not as good as pickleball as he says he is, that's a lie. I appreciate you bringing that up. I was contemplating it, but thank you. You were a very good opponent. I appreciate you playing with me. And so you are president of Hammer Media and Hammer Media is Caleb Hammer, who is a I describe him as a financial auditor YouTuber who brings individuals and personalities and other creators on his platform and goes over basically their whole financial scope and picture. He'll like dive into numbers and bank accounts and 401ks and investments and tell you to your face you're doing something terribly wrong or terribly right.

19:43And he's done that incredibly successfully. Caleb's racking up several million views per video. He has over 3.2 million subscribers on YouTube now. And so like that's one aspect of the Caleb Hammer empire. Tell us about the other components of it too. When I came into Hammer Media a few years ago, it was just a channel. Caleb had the channel for about a year. A lot of the content on the channel is about getting better with your finances and Caleb's, you know, crazy way of, you know, yelling at you or whatever it is, right? We use a lot of that following to build up a lot of different business entities that, one, are entertaining and also help you with your finances.

20:26So we have the luxury of having both sides of the entertainment aspect of it, but also the personal finances and bettering yourself. So we have products like our membership DollarWise, which is our budgeting app. And so DollarWise is about 40 ,000 subscribers strong at this point. And it's all about teaching you how to budget and becoming a better budgeter. We also have our educational side of the business, which involves courses and other free tools and things like that that you can take advantage of to become better financially and learn about how to budget and get out of debt and get real estate and all these things that aren't really taught in school.

21:11And then there's also the YouTube membership, Hammer Elite, which just launched on the Uscreen platform, about 108 ,000 members strong. And in that membership, we just take financial audit and go a lot deeper, make even more content around financial audit, around the audit kind of style in general, and whatever else we kind of want to make and our really true super fans want to see. Those are some incredible numbers. And DollarWise, that's relatively new to that application, right? We started DollarWise a couple of years ago. We didn't think it would be as big as it was. And so we launched it.

21:50It had a lot of traction. And so late last year, Caleb and I decided to rebuild the entire thing. In February, we launched DollarWise again. Completely new branding, completely new base, completely new features, and are building off of that as well. I like how you said you're in this unique position where you're definitely providing some entertainment for the masses, but then also this educational component to kind of like if Jim Cramer had his own courses and different type of programs and membership groups that people could join if they want to learn more about finance. That's kind of what I picture this for for Caleb Hammer more in a instead of an investment sphere.

22:35It's let's take control of our own financial security in our future. And then you'd be able to convert this audience. You get like rather effectively into these kind of three different tiers. And you are one of the biggest membership channels on all of YouTube. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. One of the biggest. Like I said, we're sitting at about one hundred and eight thousand memberships strong at this point. and it's still growing incredibly, incredibly quickly. And yeah, and on your point about converting our audience members into the products, I think what we've done a good job of is figuring out what the audience actually needs and building that.

23:13And so we've experimented a lot of different things and these have been the things that people have really lacked onto and are really interested in. And as a result, we've said, hey, let's double down and give the audience what they need to become better financially, not from a stock trading perspective or a get-rich-quick perspective, but from a here are the financial principles, here's what you need to get the footing to make sure that you don't screw yourself in a few years. Okay, and so with that massive audience you've built, you've been able to transition them into these channel memberships, these paying subscribers on YouTube.

23:49But we were talking about this during the pickleball match. It seems like that has its limitations as well. Like it's good up to a certain point and then you wanted something more. So tell us like what's great about YouTube channel memberships, what was lacking and what made you decide you need to look off platform to provide some better functionality. Going back to the story of the membership in general, we initially started on Patreon and Patreon wasn't really getting any traction for us. Right. We're honestly on the verge of canceling the membership entirely and just moving on another project.

24:22At the end of that, we said, OK, let's just put this thing on a YouTube membership and see what happens. We put the same content on YouTube and all of a sudden things just started working for us. People started joining. And the reason for that, I think, is because YouTube is just the biggest content platform. It's already where they're consuming our content. And it was just a lot easier to say, hey, I'm going to join on YouTube as opposed to going off to Patreon. So that's what YouTube is great for. It is great for us building a platform for our fans that they can consume more content on without having to rely on the algorithm, without having to rely on brand deals in order to make a video work.

25:09Like if you want to make content and our audience wants to see it, we can put it on YouTube. Now, the limitations become is there's a smaller group of super fans or a smaller subset of these people who want the Caleb Hammer experience. YouTube is great. It's built for a lot of creators, a lot of different creators and a lot of different genres. But with our new off-platform app in YouScreen, we can build an experience for just our audience only. and so for example you know we're not the most pc uh content creators in the world on you screen we can put out more uncensored content um we put out a ton of content we put out three shows a day seven days a week wow and on you screen yeah we can organize it any way we want to and you know yeah and to your point there like nobody's nobody's doing this and so we need a platform that works for us in our unique way of putting out content.

26:08And so tell me more about like from an audience ownership perspective, what does that look like? Yeah. So obviously when we're on YouTube, we are still reliant on the YouTube rules and the YouTube system, right? Like if YouTube doesn't like the content, they can take it down. If YouTube wants to demonetize us, they can take it down. If you just like our channel, they can take that down. and so we have the same ownership of the audience on youtube in our memberships that we have on financial audit in front of the paywall on top of that youtube doesn't always give us the data that we need um and i understand it right you can't just be given a bunch of random youtubers all this data on a bunch of different people right especially when you don't know them all personally and so we don't get things like emails so we can't communicate with our audience right when we go off to you screen, we can say, okay, first we solve the problem of being beholden to YouTube and its rules and their governance over us and our content.

27:07But also we can take those audience members, get their email addresses, get some information from them and start communicating to them a little bit more frequently. Like, hey, do you like Hammer Elite? We have all these other products for you, or we have all the free resources or hey, we have these things outside of the YouTube ecosystem that we can take them to. And if God forbid anything happened to YouTube, it's like we have a bit of a safety net and that's something I really feel like a lot of creators would benefit from building and has given us a lot of peace of mind as well. So it's great to have this community that you can build off platform.